Google, Microsoft Weather Cloud Computing Outages

By Clint Boulton |
Posted 2011-09-10

It was not a banner week for cloud computing. Cloud computing rivals Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Microsoft
(NASDAQ:MSFT) suffered brief outages that knocked off some of their key messaging
and collaboration products.

Google's outage was caused by a memory management bug
software engineers triggered in a change designed to "improve real time
collaboration within the document list," the company explained in a
corporate blog post.

"Every time a Google Doc is modified, a
machine looks up the servers that need to be updated. Due to the memory
management bug, the lookup machines didn't recycle their memory properly after
each lookup, causing them to eventually run out of memory and restart. While
they restarted, their load was picked up by the remaining lookup machines-making them run out of memory even faster."

Pounded by such heavy usage, the servers couldn't effectively
process most of the requests to access document lists, documents, drawings and
scripts. Thus, the outage occurred. Warren said his team has taken steps to
eliminate the chance of a similar event in the future.

Microsoft's outage was more serious. Beginning around
9:30 PDT Sept. 8, the company's Hotmail, SkyDrive and Office 365 services went
down, owing to a Domain Name System (DNS) issue. The DNS converts domain names into
numerical IP addresses to route Internet traffic worldwide.

Office 365-the Web-based version of the on-premises Office suite, only launched in late June, so its user base is limited to early adopters. However, hundreds of millions of users access Hotmail,
the No. 2 Webmail app behind Yahoo.